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Gulf Cartel boss: Everyone including US Border Patrol worked for me

Gulf Cartel boss Rafael Cardenas Vela doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison so he’s testifying in Brownsville TX against everyone, including childhood friends and fellow cartel members. Prisons in Mexico are notoriously corrupt and magical “escapes” are common. However, this is not so in the US. Cartel leaders can and do get decades long-sentences in impregnable US super-max prisons, something which explains why they’ll sing like canaries to avoid dying in prison thirty years from now. You would too, probably.

In troubling testimony, Cardenas says the corruption reaches across the border into the US. This could be bravado but I doubt it. There is simply too much money involved as well as threats to loved ones if you don’t cooperate.”Our silver or our lead.” Emphasis added:

In continuing testimony Friday, Rafael “Junior” Cardenas Vela described how he ruled over the city in Tamaulipas, where even topless dancers were on the take, paid to spy on drunken players leaking drug-world secrets. As for U.S. authorities, there always was a Border Patrol agent or Customs officer to be bought, he said, adding: “All of them had to work for me.”

Multiple recent arrests have cripple the already faltering Gulf Cartel, which controls a crucial part of northeast Mexico, the border state of Tamaulipas. Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel are expected to fight to control the area. Tamaulipas effectively has no law as we know it here in the US. You do not go to the police if a crime has been committed because they might have done it.

And now things there will get much worse, as other cartels move in to fill the void.